Looks good. Did you do similar stuff on the flipped side of the blade? Also, because I'm kinda interested in the process, what's with the coloring on the crossguard bit? I figured this was just a textureless model at the moment. Was that done with like some tool in MAYA that's there just to help you get a clearer view of the model (like why I assume parts of the model get those shadows) or did you already start working on the texture for this thing?
While I'm asking, as I understand it (faintly / not at all) there a bunch of different parts and layers to models / textures, right? Like whatever a bump map (I assume totally different from a bitmap, lol), UA map, and other terms I'm probably misrememberring are. And different games use different sets, right? Like, obviously, a really old game won't have all of these cool things. Do you already know which things Skyrim is using?
I also remember that when OB came out, there was a whole to-do about figuring out how to export stuff into formats that the engine would accept. I really only remember this being a major issue for animations (I think the community figured them out years after release) but it might have taken a while for models & textures as well. Do you think that's going to be a problem?
Sorry if none of that made sense. I think I only really understood about 3/5ths of what I was saying there.
The texture is symmetrical so both sides of the blade have the same engravings on them (to make it different on both sides could mean increasing the texture size quite substantially, and the general rule of thumb with games is that textures use more memory than models anyway so trying to keep them as low as possible is an art unto itself)
As it stands I have about half of the basic texture done (the colour of the blade, and the cross-guard) nothing too fancy atm but I will embellish more later. You can set up basic colours for parts in maya easy enough, but the colour information doesn't normally export out of it so it's not very useful in terms of game creation.
As for multiple layers and what not...the way to think about it is that in a game engine an asset has a "material" this material is made out of a number of different images and effects, so a texture would give the model it's colour, an alpha map would dictate how translucent it is, a bump map would give it false geometry (a difficult concept but I can show it better with images later) and shaders can me applied to give the mesh different properties like reflectivity or a coarse look. All these aspects and more are all contained in the one material that is then applied to the mesh in the game engine.
In relation to what Skyrim will have? It's pretty much standard in modern games to have colour,alpha and bump/normal maps. It's been a long time since these were not involved in games ^^. After these basics though it is down to the game engine/creation tools to decide what additional functionality it will have, shaders are the most complicated as they are very math heavy and each game does them differently (unless you are using commercial tools like Unreal or whatever...but that's a whole other kettle of fish).
Some games even have new material properties that physically sculpt geometry from the texture when the game camera gets close, so for example if you walked up to a brick wall texture in a normal game, when you get close you will be able to tell it is just a flat plane, but new tech means that the game will register how close you are and actually create the geometry of bricks etc when you are close...there is some crazy tech out there XD
As for getting the assets in game, that's just a pipeline issue really, there will be one way (and normally one way only) to get the assets form your chosen package to the game, so it's just a case of finding this method, but when the G.E.C.K came out bethesda launched a decent wiki with tutorials etc on this, so hopefully they will do the same here...
Oops...somewhat long post :S I apologise! (I did some lecturing and ran some labs during my later Uni years...I'm always a bit too keen to spout information/show people how to do stuff XD )